History questions not worth their own thread III
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General Pilates
Warlord
Well, AFAIK, it wasn't for every Muslim empire, but the two caliphates and the Ottomans charged a special tax known as the Jizya On non-Muslims.
The tax was instituted by almost all muslim empires as far I know.To be fair Muslims were required to pay the Zakat Tax; which the other religions did not have to pay. But realistically most of the time the Zakat tax was lower than Jizya due practical circumstances.
It should also be noted that you were better off paying the Jizya than paying usual taxes of contemporary empires at numerous times. Part of the reason why many Levantine cities welcomed the Muslims during the Arab expansion was because the Byzantines taxed them into the ground to finance the Sassanid wars.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Nota bene, the stronger central government desired by the Federalist Party was never meant to incorporate the Bill of Rights to the state level. They just wanted more authority to levy taxes and debt, in addition to a few other things unrelated to this conversation.
There really wasn't that much of a selling point other than the survival of the Empire. An Ottomanist might argue that life under Ottoman rule would be far better than life under the European powers, and that any independence achieved by the Zionists or Arabs would be short-lived, resulting in their new nations becoming either a puppet-state or an outright colony of the European powers - which is what actually happened - but I am unsure as to whether said nationalist groups would actually be more afraid of European powers than the Ottomans. Certainly the Zionists would be likely to find the idea of Russian rule distateful, but I don't know how the Arabs would react to the choice of Ottoman rule or British/French/Russian rule.
There was some attempt at creating one, though it was less an ethnic identity as we'd understand it, and more of a national identity. The difference between considering oneself an African-American rather than just as an American, for example, is something the Ottomans had to fight against. They wanted their people to think of themselves as Ottomans first, rather than as Arabs, Jews, Circassians or even Turks. As Dachs said, the Austr-Hungarian Monarchy was trying something very similar at the exact same time, with even fewer results.
There was definitely some of that as well. One must remember that Ottomanism was not one unified movement. There were different proponents pulling the concept in different directions, which is why Dachs said that Pan-Islamism both helped and hindered Ottomanism. Amongst the Muslims in the Ottoman Empire Pan-Islamism was a good reason to support Ottomanism, whereas amongst the non-Muslims Pan-Islamism would be seen as working against Ottomanism.
I've never been particularly convinced by that line of argument.
For one thing, the Muslims were hardly "welcomed". Resistance continued up to the point when it became apparent that the Byzantine army was incapable of protecting the region; in Syria that was fairly early, in Egypt it took significantly longer.
For another thing, we have no actual records of tax revolts against the Byzantines or widespread discontent due to the burden of taxation anywhere except in Constantinople itself during the reign of Maurikios. And in that specific case, taxation was only a secondary cause of rioting and such, not a primary one. At any rate, the retrenchment era under Maurikios was a far cry, in fiscal terms, from the middle Herakleian period.
Another, related point is that we have very little idea of the overall burden of taxation on the average Levantine city-dweller or smallholder, and even less of a capacity to compare it to the burden of taxation under Muslim rule. It's just sort of assumed that the tax burden was heavy under the Byzantines (not clear) and that, due to the jizya, it was correspondingly weaker under caliphal rule. That's not satisfactory.
And finally, it is not necessary to use taxation-related unrest to explain the Muslim conquests. Multiplying explanations beyond those that are provable seems quite silly to me. The Byzantine army was very weak from thirty years of war and was badly attenuated, so a single major defeat meant that holding the Levant constituted overextension. That same thirty-year war had seen the Byzantines exiled from Egypt and the Levant for two-thirds of it, such that Byzantine administration had only barely returned in 629-30; a generation had begun to grow up outside imperial rule, weakening the ties between state and society and undermining the faith of older subjects in the empire's ability to protect them. We can trace both of these causal threads; we cannot trace many - if any - others.
I read that the Copts and Monophysites in Egypt were taxed even more heavily than under the Romans, a powerful incentive for conversion. Amr ibn al-as was praised by modern historians as a beneficient administrator in Egypt, but he destroyed a great many towns and villages that were resisting independently in his 2nd march on Alexandria.
What Lord Baal said.
Here I'd like to quote Jason Goodwin: "It was, by common consent, a Turkish empire, but most of its dignitaries and officers, and its shock troops, too, were Balkan Slavs. Its ceremonial was Byzantine, its dignity Persian, its wealth Egyptian, its letters Arabic... Its most brilliant sailors were all Greek. Its canniest merchants were Armenian."
This was jizya, a fee charged to the People of the Book (and also Zoroastrians and Hindus in Iran and India) in return for state protection and the privilege of living in Dar-ul-Islam. Almost every Muslim state collected it until the 19th century, in various forms, when most stopped (the Ottoman Empire got rid of it and replaced it with a "conscription exemption fee"). Some, like the Mughal Empire, stopped collecting it after a while and reinstated the practice later.
As J.pride said, Muslims pay the zakat; ostensibly the money goes towards charity and helping the poor. It's also a religious duty, part of the Five Pillars.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
The majority of States were founded as autonomous of Great Britain. Virginia was a commercial venture and was independent of the crown for a long time before finally being taken over due to lack of profitability. New England colonies were essentially formed by groups that wanted to be independent of the crown and, later, by other groups that wanted to be independent of those first groups. New York was essentially a group of Dutch traders who changed flags after a boat with big guns sailed up to their doorstep. All these groups set up independent governments and mechanisms of state that allowed them to function. They had greater ties to Great Britain than they did to each other and, at the same time, they resisted any strong interference from Parliament in their daily affairs.
When they declared independence, each colony separated from the crown. They agreed to work together to pursue common interests, but it wasn't different from European States forming a currency union in the second half of the 20th Century. When this confederation failed to be effective, they created a stronger union. The Constitution ceded powers the States possessed to a common entity in order to carry out policies the States could not carry out themselves, but it was clear that no national unity would be possible if it eliminated the authority of the States to run their own affairs. It was decided early on that any system that removed State borders would be a non-starter, so the federal institutions were set up in a way that relied on the States to carry out most of its functions.
Dreadnought
Deity
This may seem like a silly question, and one that may not have an answer, but I'm curious anyways:
Whenever I see a map of vassalized Prussia, I always wonder why there's that bit of Poland that sticks into Prussia in a very odd manner. Is there any particular reason that Poland occupied that land? Was there a wealthy city there or something?
Whenever I see a map of vassalized Prussia, I always wonder why there's that bit of Poland that sticks into Prussia in a very odd manner. Is there any particular reason that Poland occupied that land? Was there a wealthy city there or something?
Dreadnought
Deity
Exactly.
That's the Bishopric - later Duchy - of Warmia. It wasn't actually under direct control of the Order, but a protectorate, and frequently aligned with Poland during the first part of the fifteenth century for various reasons (mostly personal-political). The latter part of the fighting in the Thirteen Years' War saw Warmia employed as a base by the Polish forces, and in the Second Peace of Thorn that ended the war, the Polish crown replaced the Order as the formal protector of the bishopric.
Terrance888
Discord Reigns
If there was Joan of Arc and Henry didn't die in such an inoppertune manner, would the French actually accept the Treaty of Troyes and allow their throne to pass tot he King of England? Not asking about consequences; Just whether or not it would actually happen.
GoodGame
Red, White, & Blue, baby!
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I think it was military intelligence and an indirect means of populace contacts.
The American Mafia was supposedly recruited to help patrol the waterfront for possible German submarines dropping of saboteurs/spies.
Lucky Luciano supposedly had links with the Sicilian Mafia and intelligence obtained from them was used in Operation Avalanche. The American Cosa Nostra also controlled the New York-New Jersey longshoreman's union and prevented any strikes and watched for German or Italian spies and saboteurs.
Years later, Luciano would say that his help to the Allied cause was only minimal. He even claimed he tricked the U.S. by ordering the sabotage of the S.S. Normandy to scare the government into asking for his support, but he may have only come out and changed his stance on the whole thing out of bitterness. As far as I know, Alberto Anastasia (the predecessor boss to the Gambino family, who more directly controlled the longshoreman union) never said anything about Mafia support for the Allied cause being faked or purposefully negligent.
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